>I just watched a TV show (1 of 3) called "Mysteries of Deep Space". In it they repeated the current belief that the big bang happened 15 billion years ago.
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>They then described the Hubble 'deep field' study and related that they figured that they found galaxies around the age of 14 billion years old. They describe this as 'this light that we are seeing now was emitted 14 billion years ago'.
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>Here's what I don't 'get'...
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>If the big bang happened 15 billion years ago and they are seeing light that is 14 billion years ago, shouldn't they expect to see MORE things there (rather than less) simply because 14 billion years ago things were far more compressed than they are now (compressed in the sense that 14 billion years ago is far far CLOSER to the CENTRE of the big bang and so things were all much closer together).

It is quite difficult to see objects far away. Objects from the early universe are all around us, not in a particular direction (I am not sure whether you implied that, but I wanted to explain it just in case).

>Also, based on the trajectories of some of these expanding bodies, shouldn't they be able to zero in directly on the big bang itself?

Not at all. Every point seems to be the center of the expansion.

This row of characters represents the universe when it was half the current age (assuming the expansion rate remains fixed - let's say this is an approximation); the "5" is our own galaxy, the other numbers are some other galaxies:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

And this is the current, further expanded, universe:

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

Note that each galaxy sees the other galaxies receding.

By the way, another interesting point to note is that the farther away a certain galaxy, the faster it recedes.

Hilmar.